Xeon 5500 servers pay for themselves in eight months, claim

NEHALEM SERVERS and workstations will purportedly offer punters an eight-month return on investment (ROI) according to Intel's VP and GM of the digital enterprise group, Tom Kilroy, at the product's official London launch today.

"This is a pretty transformational launch for us" gushed Kilroy, explaining it wasn't only about performance, but also the processor's "intelligence capability".

Bombastically announcing the Xeon 5500 launch as, "The biggest launch since Pentium Pro" Kilroy reckons that in many ways, the Pentium Pro could be seen as a direct grandfather to Intel's new family member.

Claiming it was "more than just benchmarks" which proved a processor's worth, Kilroy  heaped praise on features like Turbo mode, which shifts the processor into a higher gear for faster performance minus the heat penalty, and hyper-threading technology delivering up to eight-threaded performance capability on four cores.

Not that Nehalem lacks anything when it comes to benchmarks either, however. Intel's new Xeon 5500 series boasts a 75-125 per cent performance boost over Chipzilla's previous generation over a plethora of benchmarks, making it the most powerful platform to date. "This represents a fundamental change in performance," chipped in Graham Palmer, Intel's UK country manager.

But what it really all boiled down to was the sales pitch, and Intel reckons it has a rock solid incentive with claims the cost savings of upgrading to Nehalem based servers over the previous generation are so huge, customers would see an ROI in under a year. Kilroy told the INQ that with the "economic backdrop ridiculously grim," firms would do well to look closely at anything with such an "attractive value proposition".

Single-core Xeon based servers still apparently make up 40 per cent of the current install base, but Intel is hoping the promise of an eight-month ROI will persuade many to trade up, rather than stay with the same old tired architecture.

Kilroy also announced it was Chipzilla's goal to steal at least 10 per cent of the "27 billion dollar opportunity" represented by the current RISC market, noting Xeon 5500 is less than half the cost but claims 1.71 times the performance of Sun's T5240 UltraSPCT2+ and costs less than a tenth of IBM's P570 Power6, with 2.45 times the performance.

Of course, no briefing would be complete without some mention of the buzzword of the moment; virtualisation. "Virtualisation needs to transcend compute, network and storage to result in total datacentre virtualisation," said Kilroy, outlining Intel's aim to bring the V word to the heart of the firm's commercial strategy.

Kilroy also praised server newcomer Cisco,  telling the INQ,  the firm was an "innovator and not just another "me-too" player". He also noted Intel was razor focused on pursuing new market segments to capture more growth. µ